These Little Things  From Cedar Woods to Eden
by The Mad Poet
Summary: Breath of Fire III.  Fifty sentences for fifty moments in time.  Take the longest journey in the world, and at the end of it you'll still find the only place it really led was to yourself.


**DISCLAIMER:** I do not own the Breath of Fire franchise or any games, characters, locations, peoples, et cetera, therein. All I can lay claim to is the immense joy it has brought me over the years in all its forms. As such, the following sentences written as part of a challenge race between Lord Batpig and myself are entirely for my own pleasure and amusement and I am making no money off of them

Go buy these games and play them until they become your religion.

**1fandom: Theme Set I  
><strong>**Fandom: Breath of Fire III****  
><strong>

01. Mortal  
>"They are only mortal, after all," Myria told her sister, "and that above all is why they must be protected from themselves."<p>

02. Broken  
>The war ended for Gaist because he broke; Garr broke because the war ended.<p>

03. Vanish  
>"You are the only son of the Brood left in this world, Ryu - soon we elders will die, and with you, our kind will simply vanish."<p>

04. Rain  
>It did not rain on Genmel - the gutters had been carved to funnel spit, piss, sweat, spilled blood or beer, but never water.<p>

05. Ocean  
>Sometimes it was hard not to look out at the ocean and wonder what vast world might lie beyond, but sometimes, the people in Junk believed, it was simply easier not to care.<p>

06. Tense  
>It was early morning and the air was still sharp and dry with drought when three young men all hungrily eyed the last apple in the house.<p>

07. Soon  
>How often did Garr tell himself that was when he would leave: leave Genmel, leave his empty search, leave this world for the death God had ordained to him, and stop pretending that he was doing anything but running away?<p>

08. Why  
>Only one word passed Ryu's lips when he faced the gladiator for the second time, so small and afraid that the thousand ghosts of Angel Tower swallowed it into their silence.<p>

09. Winter  
>When the snow came down, the very trees and houses of Wyndia reached out for the past, growing great white wings of their own.<p>

10. Fallen  
>"I did not <em>fall<em> from heaven," Deis sniffed disdainfully, "Nor was I thrown out; I came down here because I felt like it."

11. Storm  
>The wind and waves hurled the Black Ship carelessly, as if it were no more than a dinghy and not some great metal hulk; all that the passengers could do was huddle down and try not to get dashed on the fixtures.<p>

12. Door  
>Momo had never used the rocket door in the roof of the tower before, so she supposed she could be forgiven for forgetting to open it before blasting off.<p>

13. Flash  
>Traveling with Momo, one quickly learned to duck and cover whenever one saw a bright flash of light.<p>

14. Wait  
>Ryu sat very patiently while the tiny fairy tied flowers into his hair: sure it was demeaning, but it was better than getting kicked in the face again.<p>

15. Shrine  
>The dragon shrine had been in poor repair even when he was child, but after it was all over Ryu went up the mountain every day to maintain it.<p>

16. Black  
>No one ever took the time teach Ryu or Teepo about the divided dragon clans and how they were doomed to fight; they learned that lesson on their own.<p>

17. Lost  
>Ryu quickly learned not to follow Peco - it was not that the little creature knew where it was going, simply that it did not care enough to consider itself lost.<p>

18. Cell  
>Now that Nina knew someone who had spent time in one of them, she determined that the cells of Wyndia's prison were not at all comfortable; she would speak to her father about it at once, just as soon as she was rescued.<p>

19. Villain  
>"This is the terrible power we wield," snarled the great dragon which had been his brother, "I'm not wrong for giving it over to God to keep people safe," but, Ryu thought, was he really wrong either for not wanting to live in God's gilded cage?<p>

20. Road  
>To a five-year-old boy, the road to Wyndia seemed as long and wide as the sea itself.<p>

21. Weep  
>When Rei found the little boy, he was crying; it was a pasttime he engaged in frequently thereafter.<p>

22. Blind  
>"'God said so' isn't a real reason - You don't even know why we're fighting; hell, none of you even care!"<p>

23. Pact  
>"I'm going to avenge you both," Rei swore, not to or on or by anything in particular, but somehow every bit as binding.<p>

24. Flight  
>Flight was the heritage of Nina's people, but it was a lost and twisted one; in the place of taking to the sky, she found that the best she could do was continue to run away.<p>

25. Hard  
>Figuring out how her father's chyrsm engines worked was easy; figuring out how to make them work without irradiating people, Momo had to admit, was a bit more of a challenge.<p>

26. War  
>Five hundred years ago the Guardians had nearly destroyed the Brood to a last; now, the vengeful ghosts waged a war of their own against the remnants.<p>

27. Deed  
>The first time Ryu was forced by circumstance to kill another man, he cried, but not for the reasons they thought: he cried because some part of him remembered it was not the first time at all.<p>

28. Unknown  
>No one knew what was beyond the ocean; when they found the other side, no one knew what was beyond the desert; when they found the lost city, no one knew what was beyond the ruins; when they found Eden, they did not know what to make of God's iron garden, or the answers they found inside of it at all.<p>

29. Deep  
>In the lowest parts of the mine, the floor felt like mud; it was not until the bones rose up howling for him to strike that he smelled the blood and realized why.<p>

30. Sudden  
>Nina never simply entered Ryu's life: she burst into it, hijacked it, and sent it careening into another direction before he had time to exhale, let alone greet her.<p>

31. Dread  
>He felt it all through the volcano; he would feel it again in the Tapa, in the Tower, in Dauna, in Eden; it became as familiar as it was unwanted, and he came to regard it with as much hate as fear.<p>

32. Burn  
>For years the miners in Dauna swore that they could still smell the burned flesh, and the hot sulfur stink of dragon's breath.<p>

33. Clock  
>"It would be nice if we could turn back time," Ryu says, once, but he regrets it as soon as he does; such a clock would certainly swallow the good as well as the bad.<p>

34. Words  
>"Why won't you talk to me about it, Ryu?" Nina asked, but he only shrugged, not sure how to tell her that they were just words, and he did not have the right ones any way.<p>

35. Fast  
>Watching Rei fight filled the small child with a kind of awe - his daggers flashing so quickly they looked like arcs of thunder gripped in the woren teen's hands.<p>

36. Three  
>There was a time when they all believed with ever fiber of their beings that there was nothing the three of them could not do as long as they were together.<p>

37. Place  
>In the end the treehouse was just a place, but after it was burned it was still the place, years later, that they all came back to one last time.<p>

38. Irony  
>For what seemed like forever Rei had dreamed of finding Teepo and Ryu again, protecting them as he had before; he had never dreamed that Ryu would one day be the wall of wings guarding him from Teepo's teeth and fire.<p>

39. Sky  
>God's city hovered overhead like a dream, glistening and strange, and from below it seemed to vanish into forever as if it were in fact the whole of the sky.<p>

40. Closet  
>Momo's father had left her to inherit some truly unique real estate, a brilliant mind, and a smorgasbord of unrealized dreams, projects, and machines to tinker about on; he had also left a few more questionable pieces of literature behind that meant there were just some closets in the tower she pretended she had never opened.<p>

41. Real  
>Waking up naked in the Dauna mine a grown man when the last he remembered was the boneyard beneath the temple as a child, Ryu was uncertain that any of it was real; seeing Garr crouched there, the spear he had once leveled at Ryu's heart resting bloody on his shoulder, it seemed impossible - surely this, like the memory of claws on his trembling hands, was just another dream of the dead.<p>

42. Fair_  
>It's not fair! <em>was what he wanted to say, but as he did so often, Ryu kept his mouth shut and let Nina do the talking.

43. Knot  
>Nina shrieked and flailed, but Garr only pressed one great hand down on her tiny head to still her and, with the other, diligently continued to pick at the knot in her tiny blonde pigtail.<p>

44. Low  
>Just when you thought Genmel had shown you the lowest of the low, some creep would always set his daughter up to play deathbed so he could scam a couple of children into martyrdom or something like that.<p>

45. Well  
>Rei scratched his head, then shrugged - who was he to question people who kept secret chambers instead of water down their wells?<p>

46. Token  
>Ryu could not for the life of him figure out what the damned thing was for, until the first time he wandered obliviously through a ring of flowers and found himself in a miniature village full of flying naked people.<p>

47. Ugly  
>Mikba was not a pretty man, but what he proved was an even uglier truth.<p>

48. Lure  
>A quest to find his friends, his self, or some abstract theological truth was all well and good, but what these things had taught Ryu above all was that a man had to do what a man had to do; simply, sometimes what a man had to do was pull out the tackle and fish.<p>

49. Drink  
>In the endless desert, all of the zenny in the world could not have bought more precious a treasure than one extra sip of water.<p>

50. Dust  
>The Brood turned to precious crystal and the Guardians turned only to dust; as a child of the Tapa he had been taught that this was because Guardians had given all they had and the Brood still had much to repay, but now, a man wiser on the passing centuries, he wondered at it.<p> 


End file.
